"We won't forget what you've done, lad, an' before long us four—that's countin' Sam—will be in condition to pay off our scores."
"I'll have all I want when the fellers I buried in the mine promise to forget what's been done."
"Then you can rest easy, for the matter was settled yesterday when you brought the grub."
After Skip left Joe went out to see his friends, and an hour later he returned in a perfect rage.
"That villain of a cashier has taken good care to tell his side of the story," he exclaimed, bursting into the invalid's room, "an' more'n half the men I've seen believe we got the money from Sam to stick the robbery on that thievin' Gus. Mr. Wright has taken the boy up to his house, an' is pettin' him like a prince, I s'pose, to square off for what we did to him. Why, even Donovan says old man Dobson oughter prosecute us for the outrage, as he calls it."
"I can't believe it!" Bill cried, trying in vain to rise to a sitting posture.
"I'm tellin' the truth, all the same. There's a big excitement in town, an' I wouldn't be surprised if Fred was arrested in the mornin', spite of what he's done."
"Don't the folks know what kind of a boy that Dobson feller is?"
"I reckon they do; but the cashier keeps talkin' about destroyin' one feller's character to help another, an' the blind fools here swallow all he says."
"What makes him so down on our crowd?"